Thank you for making this possible 💙

It's been a fantastic year and I owe it all to you

At this time of year, I’m surely not the only one that begins to think about the year gone by in between scoffing festive mince pies and watching Home Alone for the thousandth time?

I am a nostalgic soul and, as such, have been spending much of the holidays thinking about the past year.

I want to begin by wishing you and your families a very merry Christmas, happy holidays, and happy New Year when it comes. I was fortunate enough to spend some time with family at Strontian in the Scottish Highlands, where I ate my bodyweight in food, while at New Years I’ll be at the Edinburgh Hogmanay street party celebrations.

2022 was quite a year for me (standing outside the Capitol Building in December).

This year - 2022 for future readers - has been amazing in so many ways. If I look at my US adventures, in May my wife and I set off for the west coast, via NYC, where we visited Portland, Seattle, Crater Lake, before making a bucket-list road trip down the west coast through San Francisco and Los Angeles.

We then flew to Texas, where some viewers arranged it with the local Mayor that my wife and I should somehow deserve the enormous honour of receiving an official Honorary Citizenship to San Antonio. I ate some amazing food, visited Houston and then flew to Chicago.

In the Windy City, I met one of my YouTube heroes, Laurence Brown of Lost in the Pond, and we watched my first ever baseball game with his wife Tarah and my wife Teka. That video, btw, is due out on New Year’s Day. I have no doubt many of you are also Laurence fans, so please do tell him about the existence of this post!

We then spent some time in our favourite city in the world, the Big Apple, where we met our friends, Brazilian vlogger Juliana Malta and her husband Dave.

In August, we returned to the US for a second time. We began our new adventures in Nashville, where after enjoying the city, we drove first of all to Atlanta, then Charleston South Carolina, Savannah Georgia, and then Tampa Florida. We made another bucket list trip by driving to Key West, ending the trip in Miami.

In December, we were invited by Rocky from USA Kilts to visit his amazing operations just outside of Philadelphia, and we took the chance to visit Washington DC and the city of Philadelphia in between kilted shenanigans with Rocky.

And you’ve hardly seen any of the videos from these trips yet - they will continually to be released on a weekly basis, usually on Sunday evenings, on my YouTube channel.

We saw some incredible things and beautiful places, but the best thing about these amazing trips was meeting all of the people who took time out of their lives to come and say hello to my wife and I, whether it was in Seattle, Portland, Santa Monica Pier, Texas, Chicago and Florida. I met loads of you, and the interactions were always so heartwarmingly positive.

Doing these meet ups did make me nervous. Looking on the news, the US does appear divided, and the last thing I wanted was to facilitate groups of people who might begin a punch up over whatever the Current Thing happened to be. But this fear turned out to be unfounded, because everyone I met - whether in groups of 30, or smaller groups of half a dozen - were kind, civil to each other and genuinely nice.

Meanwhile, many of you have even supported me financially, sending tips on Paypal, becoming paid members to this newsletter and joining my Patreon membership. For those who are willing and able, I cannot thank you enough for these contributions, without which I simply wouldn’t be able to create this content.

Creating these stories, interacting with you in the comments sections and meeting some of you in person has truly been one of the greatest privileges, and I will aim to up my game in creating even more content in 2023 - while I’ll also be launching a new channel with my wife as well. More about that soon.

For now, that’s it. I just want to make sure you know how much I appreciate you.

Enjoy the rest of the holidays and a huge Happy New Year when it comes.

Shaun

P.S. Watch all my US videos from 2022 on the playlist below.

P.P.S. I’d love to reach more people, so copy the link to this post and share it with your friends, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram followers if you think they may enjoy it too. Thank you!